Shake Loose My Skin Quotes

“No. Don't never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It'll come. Like the rain fallin' from the heaven, it'll come. Just don't never give up on love.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Your days still half-opened, crackle like the fires to come. Outside. The earth. Wind. Night. Unfold for you. Listen to their sounds. They have sung me seasons that never abandoned me.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“but i am what i
am. woman. alone
amid all this noise.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“(once upon an afternoon
i became still-life
i carried a balloon
and a long black knife.)”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“if i had known, if
i had known you, i would have
left my love at home.

-Haiku”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Let her be. She got a right to be different. She gonna stumble on herself one of these days. Just let the child be.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Today, home from Trinidad, I thank James Arthur Baldwin for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“you, man, will you remember me when i die?
will you stare and stain my death and say
i saw her dancen among swallows
far from the world’s obscenities?
you, man, will you remember and cry?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“No. Don’t never go looking for love girl. Just wait. It’ll come. Like the rain fallin’ from the heaven, it’ll come. Just don’t never give up on love.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Forwe the peoplewill always be arriving
a ceremony of thunder
waking up the earth
opening our eyes to human
monuments.
And it'll get better
it'll get better
ifwe the peoplework, organize, resist,
come together for peace, racial, social
and sexual justice
it'll get better
it'll get better.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Girl don’t you know yet that you don’t never give up on love? Don’t you know you has in you the pulse of winds? The noise of dragonflies?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“i gather up
each sound
you left behind
and stretch them
on our bed.
each nite
i breathe you
and become high.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Answer me. Where does a Black woman go when she is me, trailed by myths that this country has invented about her? Where to go to, when all of you have been there already, and claimed the turf as your own and you watch the rest of us shipwrecked by circumstance and color, looking. Waiting. Needing.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“And you told us:the storm is rising against the
privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no
shelter in isolation or armament
and you told us: the storm will
not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of
the earth enables men (and women) everywhere to live
in dignity and human decency.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“And you challenged us to breathe in Bernard Haring's words:
the materialistic growth--mania for
more and more production and more
and more markets for selling unnecessary
and even damaging products is a
sin against the generation to come
what shall we leave to them:
rubbish, atomic weapons numerous
enough to make the earth
uninhabitable, a poisoned
atmosphere, polluted water?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“The news of [James Baldwin's] death reached me in Trinidad around midnight. I was lecturing in the country about African-American literature and liberation, longevity and love, commitment and courage. I could not sleep. I got up and walked out of my hotel room into a night filled with stars. And I sat down in the park and talked to him. About the world. About his work. How grateful we all are that he walked on the earth, that he breathed, that he preached, that he came toward us baptizing us with his holy words. And some of us were saved because of him. Harlem man. Genius. Piercing us with his eyes and his pen.

How to write of this beautiful big-eyed man who took on the country with his words? How to make anyone understand his beauty in a country that hates Blacks?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“i told them that men and women are measured by their acts not by their swaggering speech or walk, or the money they have stashed between their legs.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“What do I think about my neighbors? These people. These people who have sprayed the wordniggeron my door. These people who finally threatened my children. My children did you hear me? Have you ever held a child in your arms while she shook her insides out? She was so scared I cried her to sleep. How do you ever tell a child again that she's safe? Huh?

What do I think of these people? Huh? What should anyone think? What should you reporters think? What should the city think? What should the mayor think? What should the country think?”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“This is the time for the creative
Man. Woman. Who must decide
that She. He. Can live in peace.
Racial and sexual justice on
this earth.

This is the time for you and me.
African American. Whites. Latinos.
Gays. Asians. Jews. Native
Americans. Lesbians. Muslims.
All of us must finally bury
the elitism of race superiority
the elitism of sexual superiority
the elitism of economic superiority
the elitism of religious superiority

So we welcome you on the celebration
of 218 years Philadelphia. America.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“It is essential that we always repeat:
we the people,
we the people,
we the people.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“This earth is hard symmetry
This earth of feverish war
This earth inflamed with hate”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“i saw you
vincent van
gogh perched
on those pennsylvania
cornfields communing
amid secret black
bird societies. yes.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“death is a five o'clock door forever changing time.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“this day is not
real. the crowing of
the far-away
carillons ring
out direction
less. even you are
un real roasting
under a man
hattan sky
while passersby flap
their indecent tongues.
even i am un
real but i
am black and
thought to be
without meaning.

- on seeing Pacifist burn”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Help me,
Sandy. Listen to my talk. Hold my hand when I git too sad. Laugh at my fears
that keep poppin’ out on me like some childhood disease. Be my vaccine,
babee. I need you. Don’t ever leave me, babee, cuz I’ll never have a love like
you again. I’ll never have another woman again if you leave me.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“Her humming became the only sound in the park. Her voice moved
across the bench like a mutilated child. And I cried. For myself. For this
woman talkin’ about love. For all the women who have ever stretched
their bodies out anticipating civilization and finding ruins.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“We all gotta salute death one time or ’nother girl. Death be waitin’ outdoors trying to get inside.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“They’s men and mens. Some good. Some bad. Some breathing death. Some breathing life.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems

“They were coming again, those
words insistent as his hands had been, pounding inside me, demanding their time and place. I relaxed as my hands moved across the paper like one possessed.”
― Sonia Sanchez, Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems